How to Make Prospects Love You

Back in 1990, I got a job at a Japanese travel agency to pay my way through college. From the beginning, one of the ladies in the office seemed to think that picking on me was a great way to enhance her life.

Maybe she'd liked the guy I'd replaced, and subconsciously resented me for the fact that he'd quit. I don't know. But it made work a lot less fun.

A few months later, without realizing what was about to happen, I did one thing that turned the whole situation around.

What was it?

I wrote a computer program.

Okay, obviously there's more to it than that. Let me explain.

When I first joined the company, they were using typewriters to generate most of their forms. Whenever something needed to be updated, there was a lot of whiteout and/or retyping involved.

As a programmer, I'd much rather type up a program, and let it do the retyping. So I pulled out my Turbo Pascal and created a program to handle the printing of the vouchers. Everybody saw how useful it was, and asked me to make a program for printing itineraries. I wrote a program, installed it on their computers, showed them how to use it, and like magic, the lady became my friend.

Now you might think it was because I'd made her job easier. And I suppose that probably had something to do with it. But the biggest reason for the change in her attitude was that for the first time in her life, she felt competent using a computer.

That was back in the days before the world wide web, when a 16MHz 386 (which is what we had in that office) was reasonably fast, everybody had amber monitors, and computers weren't yet part of a typical person's everyday life. But they weren't so esoteric that she didn't feel a little slow not knowing how to use them.

I can still visualize the delight on her face as she made that program work by herself.

Think About What You're Giving People

Giving freebies to get mailing list subscribers, etc., is a staple of internet marketing. But all freebies are not created equal.

Reader Comment:

Antone Roundy said:

Hi Seth,
Good point. We do seem to have a gift for blowing isolated incidents out of proportion and spending billions of dollars or passing ridiculous laws to keep them from happening again.
I do think it's unethical to create fears in order to...

(join the conversation below)

Particularly in industries where consumers are accustomed to all the free stuff, giving a freebie to a freeloader won't necessarily win you a fan. Not only is it nothing out of the ordinary, but some even feel like you owe it to them. "Information wants to be free."

Needless to say, the freebie has to deliver value. But even massive value may not be enough. When was the last time the average person felt a swell of gratitude for the creators of Linux, WordPress, Apache, Firefox, or any of the other massively valuable freebies we use every day? Some of us do. But most people don't even give a second thought to the fact that there are people behind these things, much less who they are.

What you're aiming for is emotional impact. If you can solve one of their insecurities, if you can help them accomplish something they feared was beyond them -- in short, if you can make them feel good about themselves, then you've got a fan.

Think about that when you're choosing which problems to help people solve. If your target market is looking for solutions to inconveniences and fears, go for the fears. If they have issues with efficiency and identity, go for identity.

3 Responses:

Hi Antone,
A very timely post, at least for me. I am just in the process of adding freebies to my website, and your comments make a lot of sense.
I'll have to look at the emotional, fear factor of my readers and make sure the free offer is delivered around a solution to their fears.
Thank you,
Alex

I like most everything this post has to say, but I'm having difficulty with the part about marketing towards peoples fears. Where does one make the distinction between solving real and pressing problems for people vs. just preying upon their fears?

It just seems to me that American people in particular are already awash in a culture of scare stories and fear. If that's true, then marketing towards (what I would argue is) a mostly unhealthy and counterproductive emotion strikes me as somewhat unethical.

Maybe there is something I'm missing about the intended point of the post.

Good point. We do seem to have a gift for blowing isolated incidents out of proportion and spending billions of dollars or passing ridiculous laws to keep them from happening again.

I do think it's unethical to create fears in order to sell products that solve them. But where a fear already exists, particularly if the prospect is searching for a solution, if you really have a solution, I don't see any problem with marketing it.

And if you have a product that solves problems related to a fear you also have a solution for, giving away the solution to the fear in order to earn your prospect's goodwill to help sell the other product, I don't see a problem with that.

Share Your Comments:

TriggerNote is an Interaction Engine for your website.
Use pre-configured "Recipes" to create exit hover ads, exit interstitial ads, etc.
Or mix and match your own combinations of over 20 Triggers and Actions to make your website respond to visitor actions,
grabbing attention, and customizing on the fly to speak to each unique visitor.

Get to Know Us

Hi.
I'm Antone Roundy.
I'm a strong believer in ethics, and have always tried to practice and promote ethical behavior in an industry where many slip over to the dark side.
At White Hat Crew, I'll share insights into internet marketing, with extra emphasis on ethical issues.